The Stratford Version
The latest ploy by our Council Chairman and mayor is to conduct “Executive Sessions” of the Town Council/WPCA (They are the same thing, you know.) out of view of the public to decide whether to steal $5 million from the WPCA cash reserve or to just sell the most expensive asset the Town owns.
Both items raise serious questions about fiscal management. The first question is how did $5.2 million accumulate in a cash reserve? That seems like a whole lot of money for a $10 million operation. We can think of no business that keeps 52% of it’s entire budget in a “cash reserve”. Then there are the stories filtering out of Town Hall that the WPCA is losing money. Losing money? How can that be? There is certainly enough on hand to siphon $1 million of the WPCA budget to pay Town-wide pension obligations (which is totally illegal), subsidize Public Works (also illegal), pay the Town $600,000/year in “rent” (illegal as well) and oh yeah, fork over $300,000/year (really illegal) to the Town’s General Fund. Maybe that’s why the WPCA is “losing” money?
But the second item on the agenda is the sale of the whole thing to some random corporation which goes by the name of “regionalization”. A very conservative estimate of the actual sale value of such a facility would be well north of $100 million ($100,000,000). Why on Earth would we do that? Honestly, we have no idea. No one does except Harkins. The point here though is that the WPCA is not owned by John Harkins. The owners of the WPCA are you and me. Why are we not involved in this decision? If a For Sale sign appeared in your front yard, you would certainly want to know why it was put there and who did it. In “Executive Sessions” we are not entitled to participate or even know who voted yes or no.
We demand public hearings and a referendum on the matter.
